Page 49 of A Wedding in a Week

I’ve got big hands. Big everything, to be honest, and Marc’s always been smaller, but fuck me, I map his chest the same way and the contrast gets to me more now than ever. Every inch of him feels right. I run my hands across tight muscle and strong bone, across freckles darkened by weeks of Cornish sunshine, touching whatever I can reach while he grinds us together.

Every one of those freckles gets to me too. I don’t need to see the ones dotting his shoulders and back, I’ve already memorised them. I skim across them now down to where his hips narrow, visualising each nutmeg dot and sprinkle, each dark constellation, and I end up grasping an arse I can’t get enough of feeling either.

It flexes under my fingers, and I’m always going to see sparks when I’m with Marc, aren’t I? Not only in his hair or behind my closed eyelids, which I force open when he lifts himself up on his knees. They’ll set me alight each and every time I see him like this, bare as the day he was born, but all man, right down to his cock, rosy, hard, and bobbing.

He kneels above me, his gaze surveying the same way I’ve done my whole life over land that spills between the moor and ocean, and him looking at me the same way does it for me. It’s that plain and simple.

This land is all mine, and I’m all his.

Not only because he grasps my cock with perfect tightness, or because he bends to mouth at its head, his tongue darting to my slit, but because he belongs here with me.

He sucks me, his mouth an earthbound heaven, and past versions of me wouldn’t have believed we’d ever be tangled in the same sheets like now, wouldn’t have hoped that I’d get to run my hands through his hair or hold his head while thrusting, or that he’d take it from me. But Marc does, over and over, and if I’ve ever been closer to coming faster, I don’t know when, and doesn’t that describe this helter-skelter week of pasties and rose petals? Of wedding fairs and close encounters in my Land Rover?

It’s been a ride and shows no sign of stopping. The only potential crash will be in two days, his interview our make-or-break instead of a cliff edge this time, and I guess that Marc feels the same urgent need to make the most of what we have left.

He covers me again, grinding harder, and his kiss is so wild, I barely hold on, drowning in him.

Then he’s gone, coming back with lube he spills between us. Our bodies crash together again, grinding but so much slicker. We must shine like his eyes do. They’re all I see as tension ratchets. He’s the centre of my focus, everything to me. He’s my Marc, old and new, near and far, mine now, all mine like I’m all his.

Then his eyes close, and he shudders into a climax that I follow, my soul searing, my own eyes tearing.

I blink that dampness away as he rolls off again, panting. Maybe I’m not too successful. He studies me after rolling back with a crumpled shirt in hand, but that’s okay. His eyes shine too, and his smile is shaky. So is his voice.

“You can never tell Lukas.”

He means about him using my brother’s shirt to wipe away spunk, and he’s right, I can never tell my brother. Not about this.

I will tell him about me and Marc though, just as soon as I know if…

So many ifs fill the space between me and Marc when he lies down again.

If he gets the Penzance job. If he doesn’t, but still turns down that MBA spot in London. If I can make the farm enough of a success to keep him.

Marc rolls close, almost echoing the same thoughts. “I will tell him. I want to. Just not until I know if...”

We kiss, and all those ifs fade. So does the need to tell Lukas anything at all. Besides, he doesn’t need to know all my secrets. Not yet.

For now, I’ve got forty-eight hours left to keep them.

18

The next twenty-four hours pass in a blur of photo staging and of Marc beavering over his presentation. He’s determined to blow his competition out of the water. As for me, I’m determined to give him the time to do it.

I handle most of his chores while he’s too busy to notice, and I can’t regret a bone-deep ache that sets in over the course of the day. It’s bad enough to make me wish for my sling, but it also brings Marc closer to the target he circles, so I ignore it.

What’s a bit of aching when it allows Marc to finish? He’s close now. I can see it in how he also circles the farm with his phone camera. I’ve seen Jess do the same with our daft sheep, so intent on her work she quivers. Marc’s similarly laser focussed.

He’s consumed with wanting this so badly, and yet here’s another Marc-contradiction—he still makes staging the last of the photos feel more like play than hard work, and if I don’t count chasing my brother across the top floor of the farmhouse, or our living room floor turning to lava, I haven’t played here for ages.

I’d forgotten that fun was his first language—how he and my brother bonded in the first place. They both share the energy that makes our lambs bounce, although if I had to split hairs, I’d call my brother’s version frenetic, the beeps of his treadmill during his last phone call a perfect example that ages me whenever I hear them.

Marc’s version of fun is less manic, but I know that he’s happy with his progress. He’s happy this morning, full stop, and I’m not the only one to notice.

In the kitchen, John interrupts his afternoon tea break to let me know he’s been watching. Or listening. “Someone rolled out of bed on the right side today,” he says, lowering an old Farmers Weekly and cocking his head at what’s caught his attention.

Marc’s laughter filters across the yard to us. Jess also barks outside, and she doesn’t do that for no reason, so I go to the window. I don’t know why I try to stifle my grin. John notices that as well the moment he joins me. “You rolled out of bed on the right side too, Stef?”

I don’t tell him that we both rolled out of the same one. I’m pretty sure John knows Marc didn’t come home last night to their shared cottage. He must have put two and two together at finding Marc here at breakfast in another shirt borrowed from my brother.

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